The
explosive demand for bandwidth for data networking applications continues to drive
photonics technology toward ever increasing capacity in the backbone fiber network
and toward flexible optical networking. Already commercial Tb/s (per fiber) transmission
systems have been announced, and it can be expected that in the next several years,
we will begin to be limited by the 50 THz transmission bandwidth of silca optical
fiber. Efficient bandwidth utilization will be one of the challenges of photonics
research. Since the communication will be dominated by data, we can expect the
network of the future to consist of multiterabit packet switches to aggregate
traffic at the edge of the network and cross connects with wavelength granularity
and tens of terabits throughout the core. The
infrastructure required to govern Internet traffic volume, which doubles every
six months, consists of two complementary elements: fast point-to-point links
and high-capacity switches and routers. Dense wavelength division multiplexing
(DWDM) technology, which permits transmission of several wave-lengths over the
same optical media, will enable optical point-to-point links to achieve an estimated
10 terabits per second by 2008.

However, the rapid growth of Internet traffic
coupled with the avail-ability of fast optical links threatens to cause a bottleneck
at the switches and routers.Multiterabit
packet-switched networks will require high-performance scheduling algorithms and
architectures. With port densities and data rates growing at an unprecedented
rate, future prioritized scheduling schemes will be necessary to pragmatically
scale toward multiterabit capacities. Further, support of strict QoS requirements
for the diverse traffic loads characterizing emerging multimedia Internet traffic
will increase. Continuous improvements in VLSI and optical technologies will stimulate
innovative solutions to the intricate packet-scheduling task.Multiterabit
packet switched networks will require high performance scheduling algorithms and
architectures. With port densities and data rates growing at an unprecedented
rate, future prioritized scheduling schemes will be necessary to pragmatically
scale toward multiterabit capacities.